Return to Titanic
On Thursday, a Clearwater firm begins a 40-day expedition to pluck artifacts from the doomed liner. Critics worry that the focus of the dive is profit, not preservation.
By SCOTT BARANCIK
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000
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It has been 88 years since the great ship went down. Two-and-a-half years since moviegoers sniffled through the doomed, if fictional, shipboard romance between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
Two years since sell-out crowds lined up at a St. Petersburg museum for one last look at a collection of rusty artifacts. And almost two years since explorers last fished the ocean floor for mementos.
Now, the treasure hunters say, it's time to go back down to the Titanic.
RMS Titanic Inc., the Clearwater company that claims exclusive worldwide rights to the 46,000-ton wreck, will set sail Thursday on its most controversial voyage yet: a 40-day, $5-million trip aimed at plucking artifacts from the belly of the ill-fated ship for the first time.
It's an expedition that is angering critics who consider the vessel's interior sacrosanct and who question the company's stewardship of previously collected Titanic relics.
But it's likely to please RMS shareholders who recently ousted the firm's top executives. They want more profits, and they are demanding that the company sell the Titanic's artifacts to the highest bidders.
Since 1987, RMS Titanic Inc. has taken five trips to the same remote spot, about 460 miles southeast of Newfoundland and more than 12,500 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic.
During those expeditions it has recovered nearly 5,000 artifacts, including coins, suitcases, chandeliers and engine parts left behind when the British luxury liner hit an iceberg and broke apart on April 14, 1912, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew.
The company was the first to retrieve artifacts from the half-mile debris field after the wreckage was discovered in 1985 and claimed that entitled it to exclusive salvage rights under international maritime law. A U.S. District Court judge in Norfolk, Va., agreed, rejecting challenges by competitors and insurers in a 1994 ruling. But the court ordered the company to preserve and exhibit the artifacts and to sell them only as a complete collection, if at all.
Since then, RMS Titanic has made money by exhibiting the artifacts around the world -- including the display at St. Petersburg's Florida International Museum that drew more than 800,000 visitors -- as well as selling replicas, T-shirts and other merchandise, and assisting film and television crews in capturing footage of the undersea sarcophagus.
Now the company is upping the stakes.
On July 27, RMS Titanic will send a remote camera dubbed the "flying eyeball" and an unmanned vehicle armed with pincers into two of the ship's cargo holds in search of thousands of bags of registered mail, first-class luggage, a diamond collection reportedly worth about $300-million and a 1,000-year-old poetry book decorated with jewels.
The company's ousted leaders are skeptical at best.
Even if the bulky vehicle, controlled from a ship above the water's surface, could somehow be squeezed into the cargo holds, they argue, it would likely get stuck or cause permanent damage to the ship and its fragile contents.
"They are lying, or they are dreaming," said Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French submarine expert who handled artifacts retrieval on RMS Titanic's five prior missions but was ousted from the firm's board in January. He said the former leaders of the company refrained from efforts to fetch relics inside the ship not only because they considered it reckless but also out of respect for "the people who lost their lives."
At the center of the storm -- and apparently loving every minute of it -- is Mike Harris, a 36-year-old Clearwater native and Dunedin High School dropout who said he once booked acts like Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno for local comedy clubs. He is chief operating officer of RMS Titanic Inc. and will be leader of this week's expedition even though it will be his first voyage to the Titanic.
Harris and Atlanta-based chief executive officer Arnie Geller insist they are preservationists, not just profiteers. During their short tenure, however, the two have taken steps to strengthen a bottom line that has fallen since the Hollywood epic faded to the back racks at Blockbuster video.
So far this year, Harris and Geller have hired the firm's first chief financial officer and signed up public relations experts here and abroad to build RMS Titanic's profile. To boost their anemic stock, which is traded over-the-counter in the United States, they've listed it on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and have applied to do the same with the American Stock Exchange.
The company is also looking to a future beyond the Titanic. Harris and Geller have hired a diver to begin scouting out cargo shipwrecks for the company to recover. They have set their sights on about 15 sunken ships with cargo worth an estimated total of $5-billion.
But the firm is far from giving up on its Titanic franchise, particularly since it estimates it has salvaged just 5 percent of the ship's artifacts. It is especially interested in finding valuables like the cache of diamonds, most of which would be sold.
Harris dismisses his critics as driven by a vendetta and says he will always protect the ship, its contents and the memory of its passengers. Still, he adds, salvage missions are expensive.
"How does the world expect us to continue to do our work without making money?" said Harris, a "Poverty Sucks" pendant dangling from his neck.
* * *
Charles Haas is worried.
It's not just that Haas, a historical adviser on three of RMS Titanic's five expeditions and co-author of such books as Titanic: A Journey Through Time, has been shut out by the company's new leadership.
When the New Jersey high school teacher visited the company's Titanic exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry earlier this month, he said he saw disturbing signs of neglect and greed.
Labels he and others had created to explain the function and history of each artifact had been removed, perhaps, he said, to speed crowds through. A 20-ton piece of the Titanic's hull that was lifted from the ocean in 1998 was missing a glass porthole cover.
Haas also worries about the skills of a Russian group hired for this month's expedition.
Twice before, the same crew has led trips not sponsored by RMS Titanic, including one in 1995 with Titanic movie director James Cameron. During these visits, Haas said, the crew allegedly drove a sub into the hull of the Titanic; tore out the frame of a skylight to get a better camera angle, then failed to replace it; and bumped their unmanned vehicle into the grand staircase, leaving pieces of the vessel strewn behind. He guesses Harris and Geller hired the Russians because they're much cheaper than the more experienced French crew led by Nargeolet.
Harris called Haas' allegations about the Chicago exhibit "absurd." "Every artifact is in good shape," he said. "My curator visits the exhibits once every four weeks. Conservation is a continual process." As for the Russian crew's history, he said, "They've never damaged the ship in any way, shape, or form."
Perhaps most worrisome to some observers, however, is RMS Titanic's murky policy on the sale of Titanic artifacts.
In news releases, the company comes across as unequivocally opposed. "Our mission is to preserve the historic items we recover and, consistent with the company policy, no items will be auctioned," CEO Geller said in a July 7 missive.
According to Harris, RMS Titanic's agreements with the U.S. District Court in Virginia and with the Institute of France for the Research and Exploration of the Sea provide further protection. Both require that any sale include the entire "collection" of artifacts and that the buyer exhibit them to the public.
So far, the company has been true to its word. The only item RMS Titanic sells now are gumball-sized pieces of coal originally intended to fuel the ship's boilers. These come with an affidavit of authenticity and sell for about $20 apiece.
Museums, initially wary, have come to trust RMS Titanic over the years. In addition to hiring a conservator and curator to restore and catalog its finds, the company contributes to the body of Titanic knowledge by bringing academics, researchers, and, in 1996, three survivors on its expeditions. About 175 staffers and observers will participate in the upcoming voyage.
"I don't want to be Joan of Arc here," said Harris, "but it's our way of giving back to the scientific community."
But company officials have a knack for contradicting themselves.
During a discussion of the constraints on its sale of Titanic artifacts, for example, Harris speculated on the exact meaning of the word "collection." Perhaps, he said, RMS could divide the artifacts into 100 or so separate collections and sell them separately. Or maybe everything salvaged up until now could be considered a collection and sold in its entirety, while booty from the next expedition could be considered a separate collection.
Haas, for one, finds such talk disconcerting.
"One minute they say they want to sell objects, the next minute they're denying it," he said. "It doesn't seem as though there's a strong commitment to keeping the artifacts together and in public view."
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Call it a hostile takeover, a coup, or the Thanksgiving Weekend Massacre. To George Tulloch it doesn't matter. Either way, he's the ex-chief executive of RMS Titanic Inc.
Tulloch, 55, is a former BMW car salesman, who raised money from wealthy customers to finance RMS Titanic's first voyages.
He was spending Thanksgiving with relatives in Atlanta last year when fellow board member Allan Carlin called with bad news: A majority of shareholders had banded together and thrown both men off the board and out of their jobs. Two other directors were also ousted, including Nargeolet, the French explorer.
Harris and Geller were among the shareholders who voted to dump the four. They were also the only two directors left standing, and immediately assumed the firm's top two executive posts.
Tulloch said he was at a loss. "I wasn't aware of any dispute," he said glumly from his home in Fairfield, Conn. "It was out of the blue."
The same night, Harris and Geller called the police after Carlin removed documents from the company's office, which was then in New York City. Carlin was arrested, but Harris says he decided not to press charges.
Tulloch and Carlin fought back. They warned the firm's bank about what they considered an unauthorized seizure of power, and the bank promptly froze its accounts. The two also filed suit. In late January, they settled with RMS Titanic for $2.5-million in cash plus stock options.
But Tulloch maintains he was forced out because of his commitment to keeping the Titanic collection intact and publicly available.
"I am disappointed with the approach that they're taking to the wreck of the Titanic," he said. "They should know enough not to turn this into an eBay carnival event."
Company officials disagree. Tulloch, they say, was simply a lousy businessman.
"The management was changed because we didn't think we as a group of shareholders were getting shareholder value," said David Hill, RMS Titanic's director of investor relations.
"Every deal he ever did ended up in a lawsuit," Harris said. "RMS Titanic under Tulloch wasn't a salvage company. It was a law firm."
To pump up its stock, which closed Friday at $2.94 a share, down 3 cents, the company, once primarily concerned with pleasing historians and archaeologists, is trying to burnish its image within the investment community.
One key facet of that effort is to emphasize the potential value of its Titanic artifacts. In company financial statements, the 5,000 artifacts are valued at a bit more than $9-million, the cost of pulling them from the sea. Accounting rules require that type of valuation. But a firm hired by RMS Titanic has tentatively appraised the collection's actual market value at about $200-million, according to Harris.
That could be enough to attract a player with deep pockets that might offer to buy the whole company.
"A big company like Disney or SFX Entertainment?" said Hill of RMS Titanic. "One of these days, I think they're going to take a hard look at us."
-- Times researchers John Martin and Catherine Wos and Times staff writer Tim Annett contributed to this report.
source: sptimes.com |
